Robert Stein (1950)

Robert Stein (1972)

Robert Stein (2000s)

About Me

editor, publisher, media critic and journalism teacher,
is a former Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, and author of “Media Power: Who Is Shaping Your Picture of the World?” Before the war in Iraq, he wrote in The New York Times: “I see a generation gap in the debate over going to war in Iraq. Those of us who fought in World War II know there was no instant or easy glory in being part of 'The Greatest Generation,' just as we knew in the 1990s that stock-market booms don’t last forever.
We don’t have all the answers, but we want to spare our children and grandchildren from being slaughtered by politicians with a video-game mentality."
This is not meant to extol geezer wisdom but suggest that, even in our age of 24/7 hot flashes, something can be said for perspective.
The Web is a wide space for spreading news, but it can also be a deep well of collective memory to help us understand today’s world. In olden days, tribes kept village elders around to remind them with which foot to begin the ritual dance. Start the music.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Obama's Moby Dick

Relentlessly pursuing health care reform, the President is looking more and more like a modern Ahab, wounded by but determined to nail what he sees as the killer whale of the American economy at all costs.

Yet, as he keeps harpooning health insurers, even Obama admirers are warning that he risks capsizing the ship of state by, as Bob Herbert puts it, not concentrating on job creation that would ease "the frightening economic insecurity that has put a chokehold on millions of American families" rather than "an obsessive quest to pass a health care bill."

Another New York Times liberal, Frank Rich, warns: "The rise in credit-card rates, as well as the drop in consumer confidence, home sales and bank lending, all foretell more suffering ahead for those who don’t work on Wall Street. But on these issues the president, too timid to confront the financial industry backers of his own campaign (or their tribunes in his own administration) and too fearful of sounding like a vulgar partisan populist, has taken to repeating his health care performance."

The most unlikely political figure to emulate the wild-eyed captain of the Pequod, Obama is out on the hustings calling for "a final, up or down vote on health care," while Congressional action on otherwise healing the economy is hopelessly stalled.

FDIC Chair Sheila Bair is urging borrowers to pressure banks that are not lending to small businesses and consumers by calling them out in public, but from the White House, there is only health care, health care, health care as the Congressional Budget Office raises the projected ten-year budget shortfall to $9.7 billion.

For this President, there is now no turning back on his righteous quest, but there is a growing feeling that he is chasing the wrong whale.